to bad symphony is a horrible product that is worse than its base, I speak from having been forced to use it for the past 5 years, at least 3.0 is a step up. I would use open office if it and symphony would display files the same. symphony likes to do crazy things with open format files

Zothecula writes: Sony’s Aibo may be discontinued, but robotic pets of all shapes and sizes continue to stake a claim in the hearts of people around the world. Despite the apparent intelligence of some of these robot pets, their behavior and actions are usually nothing more than pre-programmed responses to stimuli – being patted in a particular location or responding to a voice command, for example. Real flesh and blood pets are much more complex in this regard, even discerning and responding to a person’s emotional state. Robotic pets could be headed in that direction, with researchers in Taiwan turning to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.

andylim writes: recombu.com has written up an iPhone app that lets you identify planes in the sky: "Point the camera at a plane and you'll see the flight number, aircraft registration, speed, altitude and how far away it is!" It's based on an existing service called Plane Finder, which tracks planes using something called ADS-B — the signals transmitted by commercial airliners with all this data the AR adds augmented reality into the mix.

Fabian's M.A. thesis is a bit hard to read if you take his advice: close your eyes. But despite that little problem, he seems to have come up with some clever applications for eye closing in a computing environment, specifically "How closing the eyes enriches visual media." You just have to peep the video showreel to see what he's getting at, but the basic gist of it involves using winks, squints and blinks to operate related computing tasks, such as closing your eyes to activate text-to-speech, or closing one eye to activate a sniper scope. Other applications get a little bit higher minded, such as using your imagination to improve video content, or merely blinking to shut off the screen and rest you eyes. If you want spy the rest of Fabian's research, you'll have to prop open your own peepers to get a view -- we're taking a nap.

boyko.at.netqos writes: "Network Performance Daily follows up on their first editorial about D&D and IT, which addressed why so many technical people like the game (or vice versa.) Now it goes into the relationship between players who stubbornly evangelize a favorite roleplaying system and IT staff who evangelize a specific hardware or software solution.

From the article: "It is no secret that the technically inclined — geeks for short — are often stubborn, opinionated and do not move from an idea. This is doubly true either when discussing a technical solution or choosing a particular roleplaying game to play. For the same reason. [...] Smart people, however, are often used to situations where they are told that they are wrong by large numbers of people only to be proven right at the end. [...] One of the problems with learning to stick to your guns because you're usually right is that you have a tendency to stick to your guns even when you're wrong.""